There Are Giants in Our House

Witkin, Joel-Peter (Artist/Photographer) & Parry, Eugenia (Contributor). THE BONE HOUSE Deluxe Edition. Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms Publishing, 1998.
Hardcover. First Edition. First Printing. 196 pages. As New. The artist/photographer's landmark retrospective collection. Now considered a late-modern art photography classic, it is one of the finest books ever published on the art of Joel-Peter Witkin. Deluxe Edition of 250 numbered and signed copies. Precedes and should not be confused with the Limited Edition and all other subsequent editions. A stupendous production by Jack Woody and Joel-Peter Witkin: Oversize-volume format. Green silk cloth boards with black titles embossed on spine, as issued. Black-and-white photographic reproduction pasted on the front. Photographs by Joel-Peter Witkin. Text by Eugenia Parry and Joel-Peter Witkin. Original etching on thick uncoated stock paper laid-in. Brown silk cloth clamshell box with black-and-white photographic reproduction pasted-on and embossed titles on the spine. Printed to absolutely the highest standards: The printing was personally supervised by the artist/photographer and has a tactile sensuousness that asks the viewer to touch and caress the page even as one flinches from the image itself. Without DJ, as issued. Presents some of Joel-Peter Witkin's most profound and most disturbing images. Almost all of them are iconic now; some have never before appeared in book form until this book's publication. Ranging from his early studies of Coney Island's freak shows to his recent work, there is a rigorous continuity to Witkin's work simply because his subject is the irrefutable "proof" of God's existence. Witkin's gods are pinheads, dwarfs, giants, people born with wings, horns, tails, fins, claws, reversed feet, additional arms, legs, eyes, breasts, genitals, ears, noses, lips, and most bizarre of all, heads. These are real people who came to Witkin to be photographed and to be transfigured. They are real people and to the ordinary eye, extreme, cruel aberrations of Nature. They are "beings from other planets. Anyone bearing the wounds of Christ. Anyone claiming to be God" (Joel-Peter Witkin). "After more than forty years as a photographer, he has arrived at a more lucid place of understanding. He establishes an erotic territory of majestic sacrifice and sacrament, the meaning of which lies somewhere between the unspeakable suffering of the crucified Christ and that of the Jews under Hitler" (Publisher's blurb). The vertiginous line between Arbus-ian voyeurism and Blakean mysticism that his work treads makes Witkin's work among the best ever taken by an American artist/photographer, very faraway, to be sure, from someone like Garry Winogrand, but also tragically grand in the way it is rooted in and captures our pain. A book that has lost none of its power to shock, to move, to give pleasure, to make us feel pain, through the pain of disfigured Others, and to give a glimpse of God, through these Others' artistic transfiguration. A "must-have" title for Joel-Peter Witkin collectors. <b><i> This copy is Number 223, indicated as such on the Back Limitation Page, and is very boldly and beautifully signed in black marker by Joel-Peter Witkin. Laid-in is a magnificent original etching, numbered and beautifully signed in pencil on recto by the artist/photographer and stamped with Witkin's studio seal on verso. This title has been out-of-print for a very long time even though it went into multiple subsequent printings. This is one of extremely few copies of the Deluxe Edition still available online and has no flaws, a pristine beauty. A rare signed copy thus. </b></i> 92 plates. One of the greatest living artist/photographers. A flawless collectible copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER JOEL-PETER WITKIN TITLES IN OUR CATALOG). ISBN 0944092578. Signed by Author.

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